Cultural Work and Higher Education

D. Ashton, C. Noonan, D. Ashton, C. Noonan, D. Ashton, C. Noonan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137013941
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

The cultural industries are an area of continued international debate. This edited volume brings together original contributions to examine the experiences and realities of working within a number of creative sectors and address how higher education can both enable students to pursue and critically examine work in the cultural industries.

Part I

The Dynamics of Cultural Work

1

Making Workers: Higher Education and the Cultural Industries Workplace

Kate Oakley

Introduction

The last 30 years or so have seen a rapid evolution in the relationship between higher education (HE) and the cultural industries. While HE has always been vital to the production of fine artists, designers and musicians, among others, the links between HE and the cultural workplace have often been as much social as vocational. As Frith and Horne (1987) pointed out and many studies have testified since, the experience of going away to college, full student grants, and the chance for a period of cultural and personal experimentation, were all more significant in terms of producing cultural workers than the provision of particular courses at universities. As late as 2000 or so, the role of universities as incubators of the cultural industries could be seen primarily as a by-product of their teaching, an aspect of their role in the incubation of certain aspects of youth culture, rather than the implementation of public policy.

This is not to say that policy has hitherto played no role. Any historical account of the collaborations between HE and cultural organizations in the UK would need to go back to the mid-19th century and the 1836 report of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (Selwood, 1999). Its (now) familiar concern was to improve UK competition with European exports after the passing of free trade agreements. Some 170 years later, and the rhetoric hasn’t changed that much. Government expectations of what universities should deliver still includes contributing to economic prosperity, nurturing skills development and offering professional training. But the global growth of the cultural and creative industries, both as a policy construct and as a sector of the economy (Cunningham, 2006), and the dramatic changes in the role and funding of HE, have seen this relationship become more formal, more directed and more calculating.

The growth in the number of degree courses in the creative arts and related areas has been paralleled by an increase in work-related learning in various forms; student work placements, internships, incubation and knowledge exchange programmes have all multiplied. In part, this reflects the fact that some sectors of the cultural industries, particularly the smaller firms who have been the subject of so much policy attention, display a suspicion of vocational qualifications and a preference for experiential learning in their recruits, a preference that HE increasingly seeks to satisfy (Guile, 2006). In this case, the argument is that the best way to prepare students for work in the cultural industries is to provide them with a mix of knowledge, skill and judgement, together with the networks of contacts:

[T]his cultural capital is not just about the formal knowledge transmitted by education, it is about a way of acting, a way of understanding, a way of conceiving one’s self-identity.

(Raffo et al., 2000, p. 218)

Many academics now find themselves in closer contact with cultural labour markets, and are increasingly being asked to act as intermediaries between them and HE in a variety of ways that go beyond teaching. Yet as awareness of the problems of cultural labour markets becomes more evident, it is increasingly difficult to avoid asking questions. A growing body of evidence, about the nature of work in the creative industries and who gets it, the geographic distribution of such jobs, not to mention the deflation of the bubble of expectations about the growth in the creative industries themselves (DCMS, 2011), has challenged many of these assumptions.

Despite the meritocratic rhetoric, the cultural sectors in the UK, as elsewhere, are stratified by social class, ethnicity and gender (Skillset, 2010); characterized by long working hours, high levels of casualization and insecurity and the preponderance of unpaid work (Oakley, 2011). While many of the HE initiatives undertaken under a ‘creative industries’ rubric (broadly in the 2000 to 2008 period) were primarily focused on involving HE more explicitly in economic development, part of what one might consider a neoliberalizing of the university (Ross, 2009), there was nonetheless often an implicit assumption that work in the creative industries was ‘good work’.

Such schemes were never egalitarian in emphasis, but they did reflect the goal of ‘widening participation’, as the New Labour government’s policy for increasing the number of working-class students in HE was known (Dann et al., 2009). This, it was felt, was aided by the participation in such schemes of post-1992 universities, arts schools and other HE institutions (HEIs) outside the so-called ‘research intensive’ universities (the assumption being that such institutions had a more mixed social intake). Similarly, the idea of the ‘creative city’ and the use of the creative industries as a tool of regional development meant that HEIs across the country could become involved; not just those in London and the South East, the heartland of the UK’s creative industry employment.

The aim of this chapter is to consider the relationship between HE and the cultural industries, particularly in the light of recent policy directives and the ‘problematizing’ of certain aspects of the cultural labour market. The focus of the chapter is primarily on the UK. While the growth of the cultural industries is an acknowledged global phenomenon (UNCTAD, 2010; Luckman this volume), as is what Nelson calls the ‘corporate’ university (Nelson and Watt, 1999), the particular expectations that students have about university and the practices of HE often differ. Despite the rhetoric about globalization, the development of the cultural industries is embedded within particular places, forms of industrial organization and social norms.

My argument is that in the UK the experience of full student grants and the practice of leaving home to study as an undergraduate created a particular kind of milieu in which cultural industries often thrived (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999). Moreover, the assumptions underlying that system are often invoked by policy-makers and others (e.g. Universities UK, 2010), at the same time as the system itself is systematically being dismantled.

Changes to student funding and the introduction of fees have helped produce a more calculating relationship between students, HE and the labour market, one in which assumptions about the student experience, common even 20 years ago, no longer apply. Living away from home as an undergraduate is becoming less common, and is less likely to be the case for working-class than for middle-class students (Holdsworth and Patiniotis, 2005). In response, and as part of a concerted effort to try and replicate such conditions in a different era, universities have become more involved with formal or semi-formal collaborations and knowledge exchange programmes with the cultural sectors. The stated aim of these is often redistributive; to try and help overcome the acknowledged disadvantages, faced by female graduates, or those from working-class or ethnic minority backgrounds in trying to gain work in the cultural sectors. However, as with other creative industry initiatives (Oakley, 2013), by ignoring many of the longer-term structural problems of cultural work, particularly low pay and insecure working conditions, such schemes often end up replicating the exclusionary nature of labour markets themselves (Allen et al., 2010, 2012; Allen, this volume).

The challenge therefore is to consider what forms of critical engagement the academy needs to develop, both including and beyond the pedagogical issues. What is the role of critical engagement in the teaching of practice, the monitoring of work placements, the job fairs and the knowledge transfer projects? How does research on cultural labour markets inform debates about ‘employability’ or the practice of incubator schemes? And how does this fit into a wider debate about ‘good work’ at what, in many Western countries, is a time of rising unemployment?

Higher education and the knowledge economy

Despite the inability to establish a stable terminology (other cognate terms such as information economy, digital economy and creative economy still persist), the notion of a knowledge economy has been central, not only to economic policy, but to education and even social policy in the UK and other developed economies (Amin, 1994; Thompson, 2002; Bevir, 2005). There are subtle differences between these notions, but what they have in common is that they can be seen as a response to the post-war crisis in Fordist production and the Keynesian welfare state (Jessop, 2002). In place of Keynes comes Schumpeter and the centrality of innovation to economic growth. The cultural industries fit neatly into any such notion, with their dependence on new ideas and highly skilled labour, and indeed the riskiness and precariousness of employment and institutions can easily be repackaged as beneficial to ‘creative destruction’ (Cunningham, 2006).

In the case of the UK, this has been reflected in a series of government policy papers, beginning with the then Department of Trade and Industry’s competitiveness white paper, Our competitive future, building the knowledge-driven economy (DTI, 1998), which was released shortly after New Labour came into office and established the tone of their economic policy thinking. This was followed by a series of reviews and policy papers aimed at addressing the relationship between HE and the economy, including the Lambert Review (HM Treasury, 2003), the Leitch Review of Skills (Leitch, 2006), and the Browne Review (Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2010), designed, as Stefan Collini noted:

[T]o make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms.

(Collini, 2011, p. 9)

The Wilson Review of a few months later did its best to crystallize these fears with its reference to universities as, ‘an integral part of the supply chain to business’ (Wilson, 2012, p. 2). Even for those who claimed to be, or indeed were, unconcerned about the instrumentality of education policy in this period, here were genuine questions about how effective such initiatives could be, given the characteristics of cultural labour markets themselves.

Among these concerns was the idea that the models of so-called ‘knowledge transfer’ and collaboration which were being put in practice were drawn largely from science and technology, and did not adequately reflect the workings of the cultural sector (Crossick, 2006). The desire to reproduce the success of high technology regions such as Silicon Valley led to an initial over-emphasis on formal knowledge transfer activities and an initial concentration on ‘spin-off and startup’ firms (Hague and Oakley, 2001). Despite the exceptional, rather than replicable nature of these examples, science and technology has remained the model for many knowledge transfer initiatives in a way that crucially underestimates the importance of the existing, often dense, sets of relationships between practice and education, production and consumption in the cultural sectors, and may over-estimate the ability of often very small organizations to collaborate with (relatively) large HEIs.

As a host of work in economic geography has demonstrated, the importance of HE within particular economies (much of this work has been done at the regional level) is largely determined by demand-side factors: the kind of businesses out there to employ people, rather than the role of the university per se (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Charles and Benneworth, 2001; Charles, 2003). Beyond the degree courses offered by universities, the wider milieu they create is often more important in the development of local cultural industries than the provision of particular skills. Universities employ highly educated professionals who are often willing to pay for high levels of both public and private cultural amenities; in their student populations, they provide a large and ready audience for cheap, often experimental music, art, film and so on (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999), and they house substantial cultural assets of their own including art galleries, museums, theatres and film clubs (Luger and Goldstein, 1997).

As Lee notes (in this volume) the research suggests that this wider milieu does not just support individual consumption practices, important though that is, but enables small firms and freelancers to be more productive by giving them somewhere to tune into industry ‘noise’: rumours, impressions, recommendations, trade folklore and strategic information. Economic geographers have more recently been joined by writers on innovation in stressing the importance of public space and public institutions in creating ‘interpretive spaces’ where ‘conversations’ can take place in an atmosphere of trust and relative openness (Castells and Himanen, 2002; Verganti, 2003; Lester and Piore, 2004). Similarly, the relationship between consumption and production is a relationship long-attested to in the cultural sectors; where the producers and consumers are not just close but are often the same person (Frith and Horne, 1987).

In a sense, therefore, many of the activities badged as knowledge transfer, knowledge exchange or industry linkage are attempts to replicate processes (the teacher – practitioner in an art school, for example (Ashton, this volume), the social relationships between university ‘ents’ officers and up-and-coming bands) that were once a by-product of the normal existence of a university.

However, in current circumstances, where undergraduates are more likely to live at home (Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), 2009) and more likely to be doing paid work in their free time, these assumptions cannot simply be maintained.¹ New relationships between HE and the ‘real world’ are deemed necessary. But forging a relationship between HE and the workforce in the cultural sectors faces not only misunderstanding and difficulties in implementation but also resistance, and not just on the part of the academy.

‘No course can re-create the experience of working’ – meeting resistance

Although cultural labour markets have above-average representation of graduate labour, there is no simple coupling of qualification with employment trajectories. There are, of course, areas, from acting to museum curating, where formal training in a specific discipline is strongly linked to employment. But it is equally likely to be the case that a general humanities or social science degree, coupled with interest in consumption or personal practice, is what leads to a career in the cultural sectors. Such anomalies lie behind many of the misunderstandings of HE and the labour market’s relationship, from the seemingly endless debate about the ‘relevance’ of media studies (it does not get you a job in the media, apparently) to the idea that the most important thing that a town or city lacking a vibrant cultural sector needs is an institution of higher lear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Cultural Work and Higher Education
• Part I: The Dynamics of Cultural Work
• Part II: Cultural and Creative Industries and the Curriculum
• Part III: Identities and Transitions
• Part IV: The Politics of Access
• Afterword: Further and Future Directions for Cultural Work and Higher Education
• Index